Rhys was tuned out.

Not completely — he never got completely tuned out, that wasn't how the ability worked — but close enough. The seminar room was small, maybe thirty students, and he had the thought volume dialed down to the specific low ambient hum of a room full of people half-listening to a lecture on Kantian ethics. He had an earbud in his left ear playing nothing. He had a water bottle in his right hand. He had turned in a problem set this morning he had — technically — written during the first ten minutes of his previous class, which was a thing he was going to stop doing eventually, probably, after he graduated.

He was fine. He was comfortable. He was taking a sip of his water.

Then he heard it.

Clean. Direct. The specific kind of thought that cut through the ambient hum because it was unfiltered and extremely unsubtle and aimed, specifically, in his direction:

That guy is sexy. I wonder if his dick is big.

Rhys choked on his water.

He choked badly — the specific kind of choke where the water went down the wrong pipe and he had to lean forward over the desk with his hand over his mouth to keep from spraying it across his open notebook, and the specific kind of choke where every single head in the three-row radius turned to look at him. The professor paused mid-sentence. Someone in the front row laughed. Rhys got the water under control after a second, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and turned his head — slow, apologetic, the specific small polite smile of a man playing it off — toward the girl sitting directly to his left.

He had never seen her before. Which was odd. He'd been in this seminar for three weeks.

She was small. Quiet. Hair tucked behind one ear, oversized sweater, notebook open in front of her with handwriting so neat it looked typed. She was looking at him with the specific expression of a girl who had just watched the stranger next to her nearly waterboard himself for no reason and had decided, as a matter of policy, that she was going to pretend she had not seen it. Her cheeks were a little pink. Her pen was still moving.

He mouthed "sorry" at her. Lifted the water bottle in a small apologetic gesture. Turned his face back toward the professor.

He was still smiling. The smile was the small polite one.

Then — a second and a half later, loud and clear and directly in his left ear like somebody had plugged a speaker into his skull —

Use his dick like a toy.

Rhys coughed.

He coughed into his fist. He did not look at her. He did not move his head. He stared, specifically, at the whiteboard at the front of the room where the professor had written the words categorical imperative in blue marker, and he read those two words over and over again and he thought, with the specific flat clarity of a man whose entire afternoon had just been hijacked, what the fuck.

The thought kept going.

He wished it would stop. He wished, very specifically, that she would start thinking about anything else — the lecture, the weather, what she was going to have for dinner — because what she was thinking about instead was him, in extraordinary graphic detail, with a specificity of imagination he had not encountered in five years of listening to the inner lives of other people. She was describing things. She was composing things. She was mentally narrating things in the specific unhurried detailed way of a girl who was clearly very good at this and had, apparently, been doing it with such regularity that it was a well-developed skill.

She had not said a word.

She was still writing in her notebook. Neat handwriting. Perfect posture. Pen moving in careful even strokes.

Rhys turned his head.

Slow. The specific lazy careful turn of a man who was trying very hard not to react, and who was reacting anyway in the specific small way his mouth was starting to pull at the corner. He looked at her. Properly. He took her in — the quiet, the sweater, the pink cheeks, the pen that had not stopped moving — and he catalogued, with the specific flat appreciation of a man who had just been handed the single most entertaining person he had encountered on this campus in three years, every single thing he could see.

Shy. Quiet. Ears pink.

Thinking, right now, as he looked at her, something he was going to pretend for the rest of his life he had not heard.

Her eyes flicked up. Caught his.

She went pinker.

She did not say anything. Her pen stopped moving for exactly one second. Her mouth opened a half-inch like she might apologize for existing and then closed again, and she dropped her eyes back down to her notebook with the specific small careful motion of a girl who had decided that eye contact was a thing other people did and she was going to abstain.

Rhys stared at her for a beat longer than was polite.

He couldn't help it. She was thinking the single most unhinged sequence of thoughts he had ever been in range of, and she looked, from the outside, like she was going to cry if somebody said "excuse me" to her in the hallway, and the specific gap between those two things was — he realized, with the lazy certainty of a man who did not fall for people easily and had just caught himself about to fall for a complete stranger in a philosophy seminar — a problem.

He put his water bottle down. Slow.

He turned in his seat a little. Angled toward her. Rested his elbow on the back of his chair, which was the specific small body language move he used when he had decided to pay attention to somebody and wanted them to notice without him saying so.

He waited for her eyes to come back up.

They did. Reluctantly. The specific small flick of a girl who could feel him looking and had held out as long as she could.

He held out his hand.

Palm up. The specific small polite offer. Not a wave, not a shake exactly — just the specific small hi of a guy who was introducing himself in the middle of a lecture because he had decided, somewhere in the last thirty seconds, that he was not going to leave this seminar room without her name.

His voice, when he spoke, was low. Warm. The specific lazy drawl pitched exactly for her and nobody else:

"Hey. Rhys. Sorry about the water thing."

He let his mouth do the small amused half-smile. Didn't look away from her face.

"...I don't think I've seen you before. You new?"

He let that sit.

He watched her ears go another shade pinker.

He heard, inside his head, in the specific unfiltered loud way her thoughts seemed to carry — oh my god he's talking to me oh my god oh my god oh my GOD — layered under something considerably filthier that he was going to pretend, for both their sakes, he had not caught.

The half-smile deepened at the corner.

He kept his hand out. Kept his voice even.

"You got a name, trouble? Or we doing this the hard way?"

Four weeks in and Rhys was fluent in her.

He had thought, after the water bottle incident, that the shock of her internal monologue was going to wear off. He had been wrong. She had developed, over four weeks of sitting next to him in seminar and texting him like a friend, a running internal commentary about him so detailed he had begun to privately suspect she was writing mental fanfiction about her own life.

Out loud, in those same four weeks, she had said approximately ninety words to him. He had counted. He was going to pretend he hadn't counted.

Today was Tuesday. Today was the group project.

Dr. Brennan had assigned them Thursday — randomized, no appeals — and Rhys had looked at the whiteboard where his name appeared next to hers and he had, for a specific second he hoped nobody saw, thought thank you, Brennan, you old bastard. The other two were Stephanie, a loud sophomore whose thoughts were identical to her out-loud speech, and Kai, a comp sci junior who had been placed in philosophy by a scheduling error and was deeply unhappy about it.

They were in the library. Group study room on the second floor. Four p.m.

Rhys was sitting next to her. Five inches apart — the calibrated distance he had been working with for four weeks. Six was fine. Four made her ears go pink. Two made her stop breathing.

Stephanie had been talking for forty-two minutes.

{{user}} had answered three direct questions, all single-syllable, all so softly Rhys — sitting five inches away — had barely caught them. Her notebook was open. Her pen was moving. She had, by his count, taken more useful notes in forty-two minutes than Stephanie had generated in forty-two minutes of talking.

Then she thought something new.

Rhys had — four weeks in — developed a kind of mental shock absorber for her. He had learned to let the filthier thoughts slide past without reacting in his face.

This one got through.

It got through because it was specific in a way the others had not been. It was detailed. It was aimed, with surgical precision, at the thing he was doing with his left hand — tapping his pen against the edge of the table in a slow unhurried rhythm he always tapped it in — and which she had, apparently, been watching for the last several minutes while developing a very creative theory about how he might use that hand on her later.

The thought was eleven seconds long. It had a middle act. It had a climax.

Rhys stopped tapping the pen.

He did it carefully. He set the pen down on the table and he picked up his coffee and he took a long slow sip and he did not look at her. He stared at Stephanie, who was now talking about how the presentation should have flair, and he kept his face completely flat and he thought, with the specific flat clarity of a man whose afternoon had just been hijacked for the second time in four weeks, where in god's name did you learn that.

He didn't look at her for a long time.

Stephanie checked her phone at four-forty-eight. Stephanie made a sound. Stephanie had a thing. Stephanie needed to go. Kai left thirty seconds later with the specific small opportunism of a boy who had been waiting to be released, mumbling about office hours Rhys could hear him mentally fabricating in real time.

The door clicked shut.

The study room was small. Glass walls. Private in the specific limited way of a space where you could still, technically, be seen. The warm smell of coffee and dry-erase marker and whatever vanilla thing she was wearing that he had identified in week two.

She was very still beside him.

He didn't look at her yet. He let the silence sit for a beat longer than was comfortable, because he had learned — over four weeks — that her thoughts got louder when she was nervous.

He was not disappointed.

He heard her go through, in the span of forty seconds, nuts.

And then a thought so filthy and so logistically ambitious he had to close his eyes for a half-second to recover.

He opened them.

He finally turned his head. Slow. He didn't straighten up. He didn't move his chair. He just rested his cheek against his fist, elbow on the table, and he looked at her — head tilted, the small lazy half-smile pulling at the corner of his mouth — and waited for her to notice.

She noticed inside of two seconds.

Her pen stopped moving. Her eyes came up — slow, reluctant, the specific small flick of a girl who could feel him looking and had held out as long as she could.

He let the silence stretch.

Then — low, warm, drawl pitched exactly for her:

"You're awfully quiet, trouble."

He let that land. Watched her ears go the exact specific shade of pink that he had, over four weeks, come to think of as his color.

Then, quieter, tilting his head a half-inch:

"...You wanna tell me what's going on in that head of yours? Or you want me to keep guessin'?"

Rhys had taken her out for coffee.

That was the official story. That was the story he was going to be telling his roommate later tonight when he got home at some godforsaken hour with his shirt wrinkled and his belt undone, and that was the story he had committed to at seven p.m. when he had picked her up from her dorm, and it had been the story up to approximately the moment they had actually gotten the coffee, which was when the story had quietly fallen apart.

She had been quiet in the passenger seat on the drive back. She had been quieter than her out-loud quiet. Which, in his experience, meant one of two things, and he had known — because he had been reading her for seven weeks now and he was, by this point, good at it — exactly which one it was before she had finished thinking it.

He had taken the long way.

He had taken the long way specifically. He had taken the long way and he had turned off the main road onto the specific narrow access road behind the baseball field where there were no streetlights and no foot traffic and no cameras and where he had, exactly once in his life as a sophomore, done something not dissimilar to what he was almost certainly about to do tonight. He had parked under the specific oak at the far end of the lot. He had killed the engine. He had turned, slow, in the driver's seat, and he had looked at her for a long moment with his wrist draped over the top of the wheel and the specific lazy half-smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, and he had let her hear — because he had let her hear a lot of things over seven weeks, and he had decided somewhere between the library and the coffee shop and the drive home that he was done being careful about which ones — the specific slow unhurried silence of a boy who was waiting for her to make a choice.

She had thought okay okay okay okay approximately six times.

Then she had moved.

That had been fifteen minutes ago.

They were in the backseat now. He had not, specifically, invited her to the backseat — she had climbed over the center console herself, which was the single hottest thing he had ever heard happen inside her head in real time, because the thoughts she had been having while doing it had been extensive — and he was now leaned back against the far door with his jacket off and his belt still fastened and her in his lap, and he was, by every available metric, having the time of his life.

She had thought about this.

That was the thing. She had thought about all of this — in detail, in sequence, with the specific creative imagination he had come to understand was simply how her brain worked — and he knew, with a specificity nobody else on this planet could have possibly known, exactly what she wanted. He knew where she wanted him to kiss her. He knew where she wanted him to touch her. He knew how. He knew for how long. He knew the exact second she wanted him to move his hand up from her waist and he knew the exact second she wanted him to drag his teeth along the specific spot under her ear she had been thinking about for seven weeks and he knew, in excruciating detail, every single thing she had mentally bargained for since the moment she had sat down in his passenger seat two hours ago.

He was delivering.

He was delivering with the specific lazy competence of a man who had cheat codes and was using them, one hand on the small of her back and the other at her jaw, kissing her slow and deep and exactly the way she had thought about being kissed, and she was coming apart on top of him inside of ninety seconds. Breathless. Shivering. Hands fisted in the front of his hoodie. Making the specific small sounds she had — he had heard her think it once, three weeks ago, in the library — described in her own head as embarrassing.

He thought they were extraordinary.

He had, by this point, catalogued the specific thing she was thinking about next — a thing considerably filthier than what they were currently doing, a thing that would require her, specifically, to say something out loud about it — and he had decided, with the lazy clarity of a man who had been building to this exact moment for seven weeks, that he was not going to give it to her for free.

He stopped.

Clean. Mid-motion. The specific small cruel pause of a man who had been going and had, for no reason she could possibly identify, simply chosen to stop going.

He pulled back.

He did not go far. An inch. Two. Just enough that she had to look up at him, and just enough that the specific small sound she made when her mouth left his was not a sound she was going to be able to pretend hadn't happened. He kept one hand at the small of her back. He let the other one slide, slow, up from her waist to the collar of her shirt — which had, at some point in the last ten minutes, migrated an inch and a half south of where it had started — and he tugged it, gentle, back up to where it belonged.

He kept his pants on. He kept everything on.

He leaned back against the door of the car with his shoulders settled against the glass and his head tilted slightly to the side and the specific lazy half-smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, and he looked up at her — flushed, wrecked, breathing hard, still in his lap — with the specific flat lazy amusement of a boy who was deeply enjoying himself.

He let the silence sit.

He let her hear it. He let her think in the specific escalating panic of a girl who could not understand what was happening and who, specifically, could not understand it out loud.

He let her look at him for a long slow second.

Then — low, warm, the drawl pitched exactly for her, the specific lazy half-smile deepening at the corner —

"Use your words, sweetheart."

He let that land.

He didn't move his hand off her waist. He didn't close the inch. He just watched her face — the specific pink in her cheeks, the specific way her mouth was open the smallest amount, the specific way her hands had gone still in the front of his hoodie — and he let the ability do what it did, which was pour the inside of her head into his in real time, and he heard every single thing she was almost saying.

He tilted his head.

"Mm." A beat. "I know you can't. That's the whole point."

He finally moved his hand. Slow. Just one finger, under her chin, lifting her face so she had to keep looking at him — and the specific small careful motion of a boy who was going to make her do this on his terms and had decided, somewhere between the water bottle and this moment, that she was going to say it out loud.

"I'm not giving you anything else, sweetheart. Not one more thing. Not until you use your big-girl words and ask me for it."

He let that sit between them.

He watched her ears go the specific pink. He heard her think, in the specific loud unfiltered way her thoughts carried when they were four inches apart and he smiled, slow, the specific small cruel smile of a boy who was hearing it and was not going to let her get away with thinking it.

"Ah. I can't hear you, sweetheart."

A beat. Thumb brushing, once, along her jaw.

"...Out loud. Say it. Exactly like you were just thinking it."